


In the Mind's Eye

by EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Dreams, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Ghost Obi-Wan Kenobi, Gen, Padawan, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-19
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-07-15 23:07:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7242514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12/pseuds/EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey has begun her training to be a true Jedi under Luke Skywalker. But in her dreams, another Jedi, one lost long ago, has much for her to see..</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

She stepped forward cautiously. She was not familiar with this place. Or this man. It was not Jakku, nor the Island she and Luke now inhabited for her training; it seemed to be a different sort of place altogether. He was seated in the center of a walkway, but behind him rose palaces, lush greenery roping around the tops and sides of buildings. Speeders, of every sort; a dozen colors, shapes, and sizes, were lined up along the sides of buildings. Behind the reach of the city that swelled behind him, there seemed to be a never ending forest, eclipsed only by mountains. This place breathed with life, every inch of it seemed to flow with what Luke had taught her to recognize as the Force; but this man, sitting along with his bare feet pressed together and his head bowed, seemed to be the only living person.

"Won't you sit?" He blinked up at her. His voice was kind, but she had enough run ins with criminals to keep her distance.

"Who are you?" She demanded. She reached for a weapon, but found that she had none. A slight breeze blew across the area between them. The man's ginger hair swept across his face as he regarded her with a half-smile. He was bearded, though his beard was neatly trimmed unlike Luke's. He was dressed much the same; however, and it seemed to her that perhaps this man, whoever he might be, was a Jedi. She stretched out with the Force, always in reach, and felt his signature, strong and defined wrapped around him. Wrapped around them both.

"I will not hurt you. I am here to help." This man felt familiar. His voice sounded like something she had heard in a scarcely remembered dream. So much had happened to her lately, so much of it revolving around the First Order, that she could not simply take him at his word.

"How do you know me?" She decided that might be safer. Find out what he knew, what he could use against her.

"Not very well, actually. Thus, my presence. I have been waiting a long time to meet you properly, Rey." She started, but was determined not to show it. She swallowed, not getting any closer to the man, and mimicked his cross-legged stance.

"Are you a Jedi?"

"I was." He seemed sad for a moment. "But like all things, I have returned to the Force." His stance relaxed slightly. This man was in his thirties, much younger than Luke; but he held an almost stronger air of authority. But under this, under the kind mask he displayed, he seemed tired. Perhaps even a touch mournful. She reminded her, in the slightest way, of Finn. "My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi. There was a time when I was a Jedi Master during the Great Peace of the Republic."

"Obi-Wan Kenobi?" She gasped. "You trained Luke?"

"Yes. Though I think he knows me more as Ben Kenobi, a pseudonym during my stay on Tatooine." He smiled again, he might have been expecting her to laugh. She didn't, she couldn't. This man sitting in front of her, cross-legged and far younger than she had pictured, was the man who had trained Luke to be a Jedi. And, she realized with a small cringe, the namesake of Kylo Ren. "This is how I appeared before the fall of the Republic. To Luke, I was an old man. But I thought for you and I, this would be better."

"What do you want with me?" There was that sad flicker in his eyes again, a brief flash before it disappeared.

"I have seen the Jedi Order fall twice to the evils of the dark side of the Force." He said softly. "I am trying to prevent it again. Through the years, I, along with others who have joined the Force, have found that without the Jedi, there can be no balance. With no balance, corruption and injustice run rampant through the galaxy. You are hope, Rey. I am simply here to help you."

"Luke is restoring the Order," She argued. "I'm only beginning to understand the force. Why wouldn't you go to him?"

"I trained Luke long ago," He said, "And his father before him." He realized now that the way he was looking at her was not simply sad. It was reminiscent of someone else. Luke's father, so long ago. "There comes a time when my words are no longer heeded. That time came for both of them, and," He paused to cast a downward smile. "Someday it will come for you as well. Until then, I give all I can to help you."

"What were you planning on helping with exactly? And where are we?" She wasn't sure if she believed him. He seemed to be reasonable enough, persuasive with his words. Kind, yet inexplicably sad.

"We are on a planet called Naboo. I did not choose it, I believe the Force has willed us here for my sake rather than yours."

"Why is that?" She noticed, for the first time, that his accent was identical to her own. The only being she had met that spoke as such. It was an odd thought, to feel this attachment.

"Naboo is a great crossroads in my time as a Jedi. It is where I lost my Master; it is where I became a Knight; it is where I truly gained Anakin as my student; and it is where I first encountered true evil." He leaned back slightly, and she saw a glint of his lightsaber shining in the Naboo sunlight. It was interesting, fashioned very similarly to Luke's, and the one she had built for herself only days before. "But that time is past." He waved a hand, and she could feel the Force surrounding them. "I'm sorry we could not get to more, but our time grows short."

He was standing, and as he stood, his athletic gait, his beige tunic and robes were all indicators of a true Jedi Knight. But she saw, beyond that, in his face and body, the transition that had occurred since then. The twenty years since he had looked like this flashed before her, an old man, alone and in pain came into her sight. A kind man, crying over what she suspected was a still prevalent loss flashed over him.

"I will see you again soon, Rey. Until then, may the Force be with you." And with a wave of his hand, a surge in the Force, he began to disappear, the beautiful scenery of a no longer existent Naboo swirling behind him.

"Wait!" She yelled. "How did I get here?" But the man who had called himself Obi-Wan Kenobi was disappearing.

"Rey," She heard his voice in her head again softly. "These are your first steps."  
\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
She shot straight upwards in the small cot in the small room she was staying in. That voice. All visions came back to her, of picking up the lightsaber that Luke now kept with him at almost all times. She had known him, both old and young, in her mind before now. He wasn't lying at all, he was Obi-Wan Kenobi, the legendary Jedi Master whom Luke spoke so fondly of.

She thought of his words, peeling the blanket off her legs to venture into the dawn sunlight alone. She could almost feel his force signature. As she focused harder on it, she felt almost connected to him, alive with the force in a way she had not found yet with her own Master.

But why?

She sighed. She would have to wait to see him again, she supposed, in her dreams. It seemed for each question she asked Luke, there were no answers. There were only ever more questions.

She sat, mimicking the pose she had seen Obi-Wan take in her dream, her bare feet pressed together, feet perfectly aligned; and simply breathed. She wrapped the force around her in a blanket as she had been learning, and released her frustrations. All in due time.

She would learn. About him. About his apprentice. About the dark side. About Luke. About the Jedi Order.

About herself.


	2. Chapter 2

"In the time before the Clone War, the Jedi were diplomats, scholars, farmers. They gathered knowledge, assisted in the humanitarian aims of the Republic." He paused in front of her, reaching out an almost translucent hand to touch the cusp of a single ship that rested in the hangar they were in. Like always, it was simply the two of them. "I think that war changed us, that perhaps we lost our way." His voice grew quieter, his accent more pronounced.

"The Jedi were all killed." He turned at her words and gave her a sad smile.

"Yes. Before we had the chance to return to the Order we once were. I believe that your Master successfully took on the mission of the Jedi again." Obi-Wan, he had said to call him, but she was yet to address him by name. Obi-Wan watched her, waiting on an answer or some response, but she had none for him. So, eventually, he turned away towards a door that opened for him as if he held a key.

"Of course, you know of Kylo Ren." She followed him into a hallway, where she could see the activators for ray shields along the corridors that they passed through, though none moved. Nothing ever disturbed her meetings with Obi-Wan except the small expansions and contractions of the force that seemed to be moving in constant tandem around him and her both when he spoke. "It seems that so many Jedi lose their way, I have to wonder sometimes about the will of the force."

"You mean Darth Vader?" Luke had told her that Darth Bader had been his father, that he had once been a Jedi himself. She wondered if that was why Luke took the fall of Kylo Ren so harshly, but they had been too busy training for her to question him about it. And besides, she didn't want to bring up that same feeling of almost guilt she could now see on Obi-Wan's face. What had happened was not Luke's fault.

"Yes. Though I knew him as Anakin well before that." Obi-Wan said. "But he is not the only one. So many Jedi, fall to the dark side of the force. I, myself, had a moment when it would have been incredibly easy to fall to the dark side of the force."

"Is that why you've brought me here?"

"I didn't bring you here. It is the will of the force," He said, with a calm smile before he sat, facing what seemed to be a giant hole in the middle of the floor. She looked down, her stomach turning since it reminded her so much of where Han had fallen to his death, and she sat next to him. "But I think you right."

"What happened, then?"

"Like you, I had a Master who I trained with for years. A man named Qui-Gon Jinn, who was actually the one to find Anakin on Tatooine and bring him back to the temple to be trained." Obi-Wan paused, and though she knew he was simply an embodiment of his life's force energy, she could almost feel the pain radiating off of him as though he were Finn or Luke standing next to her. "In that same mission, trying to secure peace on Naboo, the planet we are on now, we were attacked by a Sith known as Darth Maul."

Obi-Wan stopped, and she wondered if she should have been asking a question about what he was saying, or if he expected her to add something to his tale. Then she realized he had his eyes closed, fingers laced together in a meditative pose. "We fought with him, but I was separated from him and Qui-Gon by the ray shields you see around us. My master was killed, and I was left to fight Maul alone."

"I don't think having to fight constitutes being tempted by the dark side." She remembered her fight with Kylo Ren, after he had injured Finn who she had to leave behind for her training. She realized how much she wanted word of him, his injuries and illness, but contact was impossible here, even with the cargo flights occasionally bringing in supplies for her and Luke.

"Quite right." He smiled, as if seeing what she was thinking. "But I allowed myself to be filled with rage, to let my anger and hate for Darth Maul to take over my body, mind, and emotions until I wanted nothing more than to kill him. And I allowed for it, I killed him in a way taught as irrational and emotionally driven in the temple. It is not a moment I am proud of."

"You defeated a Sith. He would have killed others."

"Yes." But she could see that this was not the purpose of their conversation. And in her heart, she could feel that she agreed with him. "I did. But at what cost?"

She watched as the scene in front of them started to fade. She was near to waking, she could feel it. But she had so many questions, all she knew would remain unanswered until at least their next meeting.

"Why did the force bring us here?" She asked, that she was desperate to know. Had she been failing in her training? Shown that she was close to not succeeding, or becoming the next Kylo Ren? "What do I take away from this?"

"I can't pretend to know everything of the will of the force," Obi-Wan said carefully, the background around them beginning to swirl. "For me, I have learned that there is a difference between being tempted, between almost failing and turning fully over to the dark side. There will be times of failure, of darkness, but those only have the hold over us that we allow them."

He took a breath, and gave her a final smile before he too swirled into darkness, awareness of the outside world beginning to come back to her.

And still, even as her eyes opened to the ceiling above his bed, his voice, slow, calm, and accented, came to her mind. "Those are not what make us Jedi."

 


End file.
